Hey, you all remember that spectacularly effective bit of political theater coined by Sarah Palin that updating our health care system slightly would lead to death panels, where lawyers would sit in judgment over you to decide whether you were worthy of receiving health care? It was total lie, but it fired up the right-wing media and was a potent meme on the right. There was a good reason for that: American citizens are terrified by medical concerns, because we can’t afford any kind of health crisis and know that we’re one little disease away from losing our savings, our home, any kind of financial security. Republicans knew that, and saw it as a way to frighten voters into voting for them.
If only we could have known…
There’s your death panel. Republican lawyers enforcing Republican laws to make women suffer and die. The primary criterion these lawyers and politicians of death are using to determine whether you are worthy of living seems to be your sex. And they aren’t done! They’ve announced their intent to kill gay marriage, ban contraceptives, and of course, they hate trans folk to death.
Already they’re taking steps to expand their oppression. Indiana has enacted a total ban on abortion.
The Indiana ban, which goes into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death. Indiana joins nine other states that have abortion bans starting at conception.
There is no shortage of Republicans who resent those exemptions.
This destructive hatefulness ought to be the focus of the Democratic party. They need to recognize Sarah Palin’s one good idea, dishonest as it was, and point out honestly that Republicans want to replace doctors with lawyers and pharmaceutical salespeople. It isn’t just women who should fear their policies: we’re on a long slow path to doom. This is what American exceptionalism looks like.
Great. I might have to retire to Italy or South Korea to get away from Republican parasites. The food would be better, too.
There’s more horror on the way! I wouldn’t want to be trans in this country if the Republicans get their way.
So get out there and vote! That’s the first step to save your life. Then once you get Democrats in office, don’t stop — they’re taking money from lawyers, health care companies, and insurance companies too, and we need to clean up that dirty money as well.
It’s really disgusting how open the corruption is. How is it that Americans can talk about this or that congress-person pushing such-and-such agenda based on their donors. “So-and-so raised $2mn for their campaign” are we supposed to really believe that they don’t service their funders? It’s so much bullshit.
True.
This is the message that the Democrats have now and they claim they are going to run with it.
Expect the UK to make that hard right turn, politically and results wise. Their NHS is being gutted and privatized for profit by the tory clowns, Johnson and whoever replaces him. It’s just in time for a coming recession and heating prices set to triple next winter.
It does make for one hell of an attack ad. Sort of like a Jan 6 commission strategy. Use their own words against them. Republicans are in favour of death panels. I am sure the quotes could be found.
How are they going to enforce this? Will they have checkpoints as women enter the state to check for IUD’s and other contraceptives that could interfere with implantation (looking at you Plan B)?
How will they distinguish between a natural failure to implant versus interference by humans? What will they do with all the frozen embryos? How many women will be arrested for having a period?
The Democrats really are the party of freedom now.
.1. The freedom to make your own reproductive and life choices.
.2. The freedom to vote in democratic elections and have your vote fairly counted.
.3. The freedom to live in a democracy.
.4. Freedom to use whatever birth control you want, when you want.
.5. Freedom to marry whoever you want.
.6. Freedom to divorce whoever you wanted, whenever you want.
(One of the targets of the GOP these days is divorce. I guess being married to a Republican is so gruesome, that they have to keep their spouses captive in the back yard.)
.7. Freedom to be whoever or whatever you want, i.e. Trans, nonbinary, etc..
.8. Freedom to travel wherever you want using any method you want.
(The GOP wants to prevent pregnant women from traveling out of state because you know, they might come back…not pregnant!!!
.9. Freedom to buy, use, and grow Cannabis.
(Well, it is an important freedom the minute after the police find your marijuana and arrest you.)
.10 The freedom to say gay, read American history, and claim that slavery was a bad system.
(The GOP are really into Thought Control these days.)
.11 I’m sure I’m missing some freedoms that the GOP are attacking these days.
They are authoritarians who hate democracy, voting, and….freedom!!!
Roll eyes.
The Zygote Police, of course.
Do try to keep up here.
It isn’t very enforceable and they know it.
As of now, in theory any pregnant person can just travel out of Indiana and get an abortion in a free state.
They may well set up enforcement mechanisms, even it they don’t call them the Zygote Police.
In Romania under Ceausescu, when they outlawed birth control and abortion, they did actually use their large police state police forces to try and get more women pregnant against their will.
It didn’t work though, the birth rate ended up where it was.
One thing the christofascists are considering is making medical personnel, especially in the emergency rooms, mandatory reporters.
If a girl or woman comes in after having a miscarriage, well, it could have also been after taking abortion drugs (4% of the cases). It isn’t possible to tell the difference between the two unless they ask and the victim tells them. They will ask anyway and lie and tell you they can tell the difference.
They are also after diabetics who need insulin, by refusing to cap its price.
I wish I could trust Democrats to ACTUALLY fight for all those things they claim to support.
@5. whywhywhy :
Badly with malice and hypocrisy and malignant racist classist hatred of course.
Shhh . don’t give them ideas! Actually they’re probly already planning this and more. Wouldn’t surprise me. What was it Trump wanted against immigrants again, trenches full of crocodiles and lasers all along the border or something like that?
They won’t.
Put them on a giant alter topped with a golden Trump idol maybe?
As many as they decide they want to and suits them.
Sarcastic* but also, yeah. Its what they’re all too likely to really do isn’t it? The cruelty, the fear, the malicious trolling sadism of it being their point as well as their twisted pleasure. But of course, its the left that are “radical” and inspired by Devils / Demons, teh Aunty Christ, etc ..
Or is the word ‘sardonic’ maybe?
#9: Me, too. But if it’s a choice between the apathetic toady who is taking their sweet time to help you out, and the psychotic madman with a knife, choose the former.
What incentive would they have to clean any of that up, if you just keep voting for them? Democrats won’t give an inch until an insurgent third party storms their legislative chambers and steals their lunch.
From Quora, via Mano Singham. (https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2019/07/22/good-answer-to-a-health-care-question/#more-53805)
Like who? Name names. (How, specifically, are they helping you out? Or to put it differently, what kind of deranged shit must you have wanted from them?)
If you’re a child in Gaza, you’re facing a lot more than a fucking knife.
“What incentive would they have to clean any of that up, if you just keep voting for them? Democrats won’t give an inch until an insurgent third party storms their legislative chambers and steals their lunch.”
This is a profoundly stupid and intellectually dishonest take.
Speaking as a trans person on the current state of trans rights in the country, I’ve spent the last six years wondering what would be the best country to flee to if/when conservatives get enough control to start criminalizing being trans on a national level.
@15
Well then, Jim, what is your solution for taking back some semblance of democracy from the clutches of a thoroughly corrupted party? Democrats won’t do the right thing if you ask nicely any more than Republicans will, but they do respond to fear, sometimes.
Offer something with intellectual rigor if you’re going to be smug about it.
No, try Australia PZ. Among best health care in world and free or cheap to the patient.
@12: And how do you think any third party is going to get traction? If one of the two suffers such a string of catastrophic losses that they seem vulnerable to a third party replacing them. That’s how it’s happened before, from what I recall of history classes. So which party do you want to put up with being dominant for several election cycles while a new party replaces one of the old ones? Greedy Old Psychos? Or the ones who have at least enough understanding of the country to know what the right things to say are?
@beholder This has been argued at length. I’m not going to waste my time trying to reach someone as profoundly stupid, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest as you must be to still hold such an absurd position … a position that gave us Trump.
BTW, just how deplorable of a stupid lying sack of garbage must one be to claim “Democrats won’t give an inch until an insurgent third party storms their legislative chambers and steals their lunch.” and then demand intellectual rigor.
Political parties aren’t static things; the Democratic Party has moved to the left by progressive activists … I know people who started years ago on local committees and eventually moved into state and federal positions. But you can bet that an ignorant moron like beholder has done nothing at all to shape it.
“Like who? Name names.”
Is cr really too stupid to understand the analogy? (After the players were already named, yet.)
“If you’re a child in Gaza, you’re facing a lot more than a fucking knife”
You think Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, daughter of Palestinian immigrants, doesn’t know that?
The hell with you stupid purists who make worse the very things you decry.
“Or the ones who have at least enough understanding of the country to know what the right things to say are?”
The PACT Act, Inflation Reduction Act (with $370 billion to address greenhouse gases), record numbers of rational judges appointed, Biden’s Executive Orders to withhold Medicare funds from providers who refuse to offer emergency abortion services and directing his administration to protect interstate travel and other responses to the thug SCOTUS ruling, among many other actions, aren’t just saying things. Biden is working with a 48+2 sometimes vs. 50 Senate, far less than any other past Democratic President. Is that enough, have they fallen short of what they can and should do? Of course. But not recognizing the reality is stupid, ignorant, and intellectually lazy.
Republicans really do want to kill you!!!
This isn’t hyperbole or something dramatic for click bait headlines. Proof.
This is yet again another attack on the Affordable Health Care act by fundie xians. In this case, they are objecting to preventative health care because it saves many lives.
So is this lawsuit going to work? It probably will because the federal judges in Texas are right wingnuts.
@20,21,22
Nice try, troll. You’ve got nuthin’, you can’t even muster a coherent explanation of your position, and you resort to name-calling instead.
Have fun spitting rage at your computer in the wee hours of the morning. I have better things to do.
#12 “What incentive would they have to clean any of that up, if you just keep voting for them? ”
That is a problem of the American voting system. You get to choose only the lesser of 2 evils.
Australia has preferential voting with many parties throwing their hat in the ring.
That is why at the last election we decimated a republican lite government without increasing the representation of the opposition. Instead we had an increase in Greens and independant members in house and senate.